24) My best blog posts

Fast running out of ideas and fast running out of days on my blogaday challenge. Today, in an effort to fill up a little bit of space I’m going to have a look back through the twelve year history of this blog and bring to your attention some of my best (in my very own extremely conceited opinion) posts.

I’m going to do my best to be the best Father, Parent, Friend, Confidant, Teacher, Entertainer, Companion, Provider, Supporter and Advisor that I can. I’m going to change my life, my goals, my focus for another human being. I am going to do my all to ensure that my child has the best possible start in life and is loved and cherished and protected to the utmost of my ability.

The Christian faith worships God for the complete global annihilation of the human race and animal kingdom in the story of Noah and The Flood. We’re talking all creatures great and small, the young, the old, the frail, the mentally infirm. Babies in the womb who had no chance of life and were therefore free from sin were killed when their Mother’s were drowned by God’s flood.

To say I’ll miss him is wrong. I missed him every damn day since I was 13. I missed him for 20 years, even for those brief two years we spent together when I lived in Nottingham. Even then he wasn’t the Dad that I wanted or needed. We were close, like I am close to other friends. But it was not what it should have been.

Standing there with my boy’s arms around my neck just watching the display I realised that this is what is important. It’s not about what we can commit to electronic memory to be forgotten as soon as it’s happened, it’s about what we can feel and remember. What we can share with those people who matter to us.

I remember speaking to Tom about something, I can’t remember the details, but I’d said to him, “but we don’t live together anymore.” To which he replied, “Yes but you live in my heart and I live in your heart.” I was stunned into silence. What do you say to something like that? The kid is five and he grasped the very fabric of our relationship on a level which this bumbling old fool could not?

I think that sometimes if you don’t stop and think about it, you miss it. You miss the development of infant into child into young man. Driving along listening to him natter away. Pointing out cars he likes (“COOL FORD FOCUS RS, MATE!”) as we swing through Yarm. Telling me about getting detention two days in a row because “Peter is a grass”. He’s his own little person and I wasn’t paying attention to that.